A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
Ana Lily Amirpour's black-and-white Iranian vampire Western is the genre's most striking recent debut. The chador is the film's masterstroke of design.
Genre: Horror (Page 4)
HorrorDaybreakers (2009)
The Spierig brothers imagined a near future where vampirism has won. It is a genuinely smart science-fiction idea, and for its first hour the film is a sharp dystopian satire.
Horror30 Days of Night (2007)
Vampires descend on an Alaskan town facing a month without sunrise. The idea is so good it feels stolen from someone smarter.
DramaLet Me In (2010)
Matt Reeves remakes Let the Right One In with care and conviction. Let Me In earns its 8 by being the rarest of things, an American remake of a beloved foreign film that justifies its own existence.
HorrorStake Land (2010)
Jim Mickle's Stake Land uses vampires as backdrop for a melancholy survival drama. Sometimes the vampires are not the point.
DramaByzantium (2012)
Neil Jordan returns to vampires with a feminist story of a mother and daughter surviving two centuries. The film's mythology is explicitly gendered.
ActionFrom Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
The tonal whiplash is the entire experience. From Dusk Till Dawn earns its 7 by being two completely different movies stapled together, and by the strange fact that the staple holds.
DramaNosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
Werner Herzog remakes Murnau as a tragedy, and Klaus Kinski's Dracula is the genre's saddest monster. The vampire here is not merely frightening.
ComedyThe Fearless Vampire Killers (1967)
Roman Polanski's affectionate Hammer parody is more gorgeous gothic fairy tale than laugh-out-loud comedy. The Fearless Vampire Killers earns its 6.5 as a beautiful, uneven oddity, a horror comedy that is more interested in atmosphere than in jokes and lands…
HorrorDracula (1958)
Hammer's 1958 Dracula made the vampire physical, sexual, and bloody. Christopher Lee plays Dracula, and the performance redefined the role.
HorrorVampyr (1932)
Characters appear and vanish. Vampyr earns its 8 as the strangest, dreamiest, and most genuinely uncanny vampire film ever made, a 1932 work by the Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer that abandons plot and logic in favor of pure nightmare.
HorrorBlack Sunday (1960)
Mario Bava's debut is one of the most visually ravishing horror films ever made and launched Italian gothic. Bava had been a cinematographer, and it shows in every frame.